Jubilee Hitchhiker (75 page)

Emmett Grogan expressed surprise when Peter Berg signed the lease and began hustling rent money. The Hun had shown only a marginal interest in the two previous free stores, preoccupied with his work for the Mime Troupe. Before long, Berg took over the management of the new establishment, renaming it “The Trip Without a Ticket” and making it the focus for his radical ideas about “guerrilla theater.” His wife, Judy Goldhaft, ran a free sewing workshop and taught tie-dye techniques, launching an underground fashion trend that swept the country.

The Hun resigned from the Mime Troupe and devoted all his time to The Trip Without a Ticket, viewing the store as a theater and all of its “customers” as “life actors” in dramas of their own invention. Berg developed his thoughts on the subject into an eight-page manifesto titled “Trip Without a Ticket” (“Guerrilla theater intends to bring audiences to liberated territory to create life actors”), which The Communication Company printed as a pamphlet and distributed for free throughout the city. Another Digger manifesto proclaimed, “the Trip Without a Ticket will be total theater and offer the store as a social art form.”

Peter Berg's ideas carried great weight with Richard Brautigan, who spent a good deal of time in his company during this turbulent year. Art Boericke, a professional gardener somewhat older than the other Diggers, remembered seeing Brautigan at Peter and Judy's little cottage in the Inner Mission “three or four times a month,” whenever Art came into the city from Marin. “I can hardly remember a single occasion when I was at their home when Richard was not there. I am sure he must have been there a good portion of the week, at least evenings.” Brautigan was already a life actor. Over the past decade, he had gradually created the character he inhabited. The Hun's penetrating intellect and radical ideas validated this endeavor.

Peter Berg remembered Brautigan as “very polite and meticulous. He never talked about poverty, the war, racism, or police brutality in his writing. He more or less forfeited political analysis to people like myself.” Richard hung out with the Diggers and felt sympathetic with their goals, but his attraction was emotional, not philosophical. As Berg recalled, “If you asked him about the class system he would reply, ‘There are no classes in a lake,' his point being that nature is grander than classes.”

All this time, the philosophical difference between the Diggers and the HIP merchants had escalated to the point where all sides agreed mediation would be beneficial. Seeking a neutral site for their discussion, they selected Glide Memorial Church, downtown in the Tenderloin at the corner of Taylor and Ellis. Though it had once been a middle-class neighborhood, years of neglect transformed the Tenderloin into a gritty slum where homeless winos huddled in doorways and prostitutes of both sexes plied their trade day and night. These outcasts became Glide's new congregation. Under the dynamic leadership of Reverend Cecil Williams, an exuberant black man who knew in his heart the true meaning of Christian love, the venerable Methodist church opened its doors to the dregs of society. Glide offered a drug rehabilitation program, job placement, daycare, and a free lunch service that fed thousands every week. It was a church close to the Diggers' hearts.

Early in February, both sides gathered in the basement, the conference speakers seated on a circle of chairs surrounded by more than one hundred spectators. The main issue was the projected influx of over fifty thousand young people into the Haight-Ashbury once school let out for
the summer. Because of the media attention attracted by the HIP-sponsored Be-In, the Diggers believed the Haight Street merchants had to take responsibility and make contingency plans for the newcomers' welfare. All the store owners had to offer was a rehashed version of the Job Co-op (which hired runaway teenage girls at a buck an hour to sew up embroidered dresses for their hip boutiques) and a proposal by the Thelin brothers to turn the back room at the Psyche Shop into a “calm center” where kids off the street could come down from bad trips.

This enraged Emmett Grogan. He jumped to his feet and launched into a vicious tirade denouncing the HIP merchants as “cloud-dwellers” and “motherfuckers.” Strutting like a movie gangster with his IRA cap pulled down over one eye, Grogan berated the long-haired shopkeepers before storming out of the church basement, accompanied by his Digger brothers. Several of the underground weeklies reporting the event (“CLASS WAR IN THE HAIGHT”) wrote that he had threatened to bomb any of the stores refusing to donate a percentage of their profits back to the community. The day after the angry meeting, Peter Krug, owner of Wild Colors at 1418 Haight Street, posted a sign in his shop window detailing his business expenses. With a $200 monthly net, the originator of the Job Co-op notion wondered how he might make his business more nonprofit.

Richard Brautigan stayed abreast of the conflicts within the hip community from the safe remove of a perpetual observer. Of far greater interest to him was the February publication in Italy of
Il Generale Immaginario
(
A Confederate General from Big Sur
) by Rizzoli. Grove Press mailed him a copy that he found “very handsome.” Grove's edition of the book had sold poorly, but here was another chance, a rebirth. Around the same time, Don Allen discovered a batch of Brautigan's early poems among his papers. His enjoyment rereading them enhanced his enthusiasm for the Four Seasons' planned publication of
Trout Fishing
. Don mailed them to Richard for inclusion in the Coyote Books collection along with a small gift as a “token of [his] admiration.” Allen inquired what the poetry books would be called, signing off, “Yours in the faith, Don.”

Ramparts
magazine came out on Valentine's Day with a lead story on “The Hippies.” Stanley Mouse was pictured on the cover, the prototypical acid head. Another poster artist, Wes Wilson, designed a psychedelic title page. Jann Wenner contributed short memos dealing with historical background. The cover story was written by
Ramparts
editor Warren Hinckle III, poison pen in hand. “A Social History of the Hippies” utilized Chester Anderson's thirty hours of interviews for a sneering put-down of the Haight-Ashbury scene. Hinckle called Ken Kesey “a hippie has-been,” referred to Emmett Grogan as Frodo Baggins (the questing Hobbit in
The Lord of the Rings
) and compared the counterculture to Fascism and the John Birch Society. Ralph Gleason, who had included a piece on his own observations of the youth movement, quit the magazine's editorial board to protest Hinckle's snide hatchet job.

In spite of the bad press, the Diggers planned an event designed as their response to the Human Be-In. In company with the Artists Liberation Front, who had produced numerous street fairs the previous fall, the Diggers arranged for an organizational meeting at Glide Memorial, site of one of the ALF's public events. Glide by its very nature remained hospitable to the notion of unorthodox community activity, having previously sponsored a liturgical jazz Christmas Happening.

The meeting got underway in the Glide basement. Word went out earlier the same day among the close-knit artistic community. Mime Trouper Peter Coyote, serving as a courier for the event, stopped Richard Brautigan on the southeast corner of Ashbury and Clayton and told him to be there or be square. At the appointed time, Richard stood at the back of the room, taking everything
in like an owl “seeking the sources of sound.” According to Coyote, the group was “animated by a healthy sense of competition with the Human Be-In, hoping to create an event that would more accurately demonstrate what a free city celebration might be.” The basement rang with “whoops of delight” at the outlandish suggestions. It was decided to divide Glide Church into “territories,” the various rooms devoted to different happenings, each designed to create, as Grogan put it, “scenes in which they themselves and others would be able to act out their own fantasies.”

All present agreed to limit the advertising to word of mouth (“except for a few handbills”) and to extend the event for seventy-two hours over a three-day weekend “in order for it to be effective,” immersing those attending into “assuming freedom.” The officials at Glide were told as little as possible about the actual plans, being assured the Artistic Liberation Front intended to present “a carnival of the performing arts.” The free-flowing environmental happening had no rules, except (wink, wink) no drugs would be allowed. Before breaking up for the night, the rowdy group selected a catchy name for their big bash, calling it “The Invisible Circus: The Right of Spring.”

Richard Brautigan loved the idea of keeping the location of the Diggers' art carnival a secret until the last possible moment. He made it into a game. When Richard called Keith Abbott down in Monterey the day before the event, requisitioning Keith's van for the Diggers, he revealed nothing about “why or for what. ‘Just come,' he ordered. ‘You won't want to miss it.'” Brautigan knew the secret was out in the open. Haight Street buzzed with word of The Invisible Circus. The Communication Company printed up a thousand eight-and-a-half-by-eleven red, yellow, and blue handbills featuring a stylized circus wagon to advertise their “72 hr environmental community happening.”

Richard phoned Victor Moscoso, asking him to do a poster for the event. Any job for the Diggers was a donation, and Moscoso, currently working in color, scaled back his palette. He selected a black-and-white picture from an art book on surrealism and painted the lettering above it in a single evening. To Charles Perry, the image on Moscoso's small handbill looked like “a human being with a rubber eraser for a face.”

Keith Abbott drove up from Monterey on a brisk February morning and hauled the com/co Gestetners, along with stencils and reams of paper, over to Glide from Claude Hayward's apartment. At the church, he humped it all upstairs to the second-floor room Richard Brautigan christened “The John Dillinger Computer Complex.” The John Dillinger name, emblazoned on brown butcher paper illustrated with cartoon renditions of a smoking gat and a couple getaway cars, hung on the wall of the Digger newsroom. Claude and Chester got the machines running and a last-minute squiggle-lettered Invisible Circus poster rushed off the press, touting “The John Dillenger Computor [
sic
]” along with the Lion Priests and the Wind Spinners.

There was even a playroom stocked with toys for kids of all ages. “Paper spaghetti and no rules.”

Various factions among the art community claimed fifty rooms in the church and prepared them for happenings. There were rooms designed for confrontation and others reserved for theoretical peace and quiet. Down the hall from the John Dillinger Computer stretched “love alley,” a number of separate offices redecorated with mattresses covered by colorful Indian bedspreads and equipped with candles, perfumes, incense, and lubricating oils in preparation as “love-making salons.” Elsewhere, a room had been set aside for tie-dying classes, and another was designated as a sewing center. Lenore Kandel staked out her space, and Mouse had a setup for hand-painting T-shirts. Downstairs in the cafeteria dining room, the Diggers prepared to feed the expected masses.

Teams of volunteers, including Keith Abbott, spent the afternoon preparing for the three-day marathon happening. Emmett Grogan trucked over “tons of shredded plastic” he'd scored from a local factory and filled a downstairs corridor waist-deep with the stuff. Rumors spread like mononucleosis. Pig Pen of the Dead was scheduled to play the organ in the chapel, and word went out that Big Brother and the Holding Company would make an appearance. In his Friday “On the Town” column in the
Chronicle
, Ralph Gleason devoted two long paragraphs to The Invisible Circus, stating that Big Brother “will sing and play ‘Amazing Grace' at the 11 a.m. regular Sunday services.” More talk concerned a “Slo-Mo Destruction Derby” with “junker cars” colliding head-on at low speed in the church parking lot next door. A guy showed up in the afternoon with a bucket full of oysters. Richard Brautigan had sent him out to Point Reyes earlier in the day to buy several dozen from the oyster farms on Tomales Bay. Keith Abbott asked Richard what he intended to do with the mollusks. He received only a sly mysterious smile in reply.

The festivities got under way at 8:00 PM Friday the twenty-fourth, when the Orkustra started jamming in the Fellowship Room. An elevator at the Taylor Street entrance carried visitors up to the Sanctuary and second-floor offices or down to the basement level, where the throb of rock music beckoned. Even as the early arrivals struggled through a hallway filled with clinging plastic shreds, the John Dillinger Computer's first publication rattled off the Gestetners and was distributed to the gathering crowd.

“I Ching Flash One,” the first of more than seventy-five broadsides issued that night, reported that the hexagram for the moment from the
I Ching
was “Breakthrough to the Creative.” Those who managed to break through the shredded plastic found themselves in a cramped rec room whose low ceiling and close proximity to the boiler made it “sweltering hot.” Emmett Grogan described how the Orkustra's amplified music (“blustering with outrageous noise”) reached a decibel level so intense that many listeners were brought to tears.

Upstairs, Chester Anderson typed the latest news and rumors onto a stencil. Reporters from the John Dillinger Computer roamed the hallways and brought back stories of what they had seen out among the throng. At 8:27 PM, “Flash Two” was distributed to anyone wanting a copy. In it, Anderson passed along a “usually reliable rumor” that doses of LSD were being given away to “groovy-looking people of all genders” and stated that journalists from the
Chronicle
were on the premises “in a dazed condition. Give them all the help they can use & more.”